Posts

With the current debate on the debt limit, and the conservative side of the spectrum going on about Obama being at fault, here is an interesting chart that breaks down the comparison between Obama and Bush as to who has had the worst effect on the debt.
﻿

These are the new voices of religious conservative movement. And they are as important to the values side of Republican politics as the anti-tax crusaders, Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce are to the economic side. Most of all, they have Rick Perry's ear, and they'll be on hand at Perry's prayer meeting in Houston:

For those who support individual rights, and everyone who reads this blog should, the U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee is holding the first hearings ever on repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat, has stated, “I find it unbelievable in the year 2011,that there is still a need to hold hearings and debates about whether a human being should be able to marry the person they love.” But the Republicans, lead by Charles Grassley, with a continuing desire to control peoples lives as if they were characters in an Orwellian novel, are fighting in defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) Act.

Here is a video of recently elected Democrat Al Franken putting the smack down on one of Grassley’s witnesses.

Normally I would use this as an opportunity to make fun of southerners, as these cops are in Georgia. But the reality is that police most anywhere would probably do the same.

In Midway, Georgia three girls did many do, and many have done for generations. The girls decided to make a little extra candy money by opening a lemonade stand. But when local officer drove past and noticed the stand, he promptly shut them down. The girls didn't have a $50 dollar a day food permit, and of course the lemonade could contain anything since it hasn't been quality checked.

According to MSNBC, "We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance."

Once again, instead of going after actual criminals, the police are picking on the easy targets. In this case, three little girls.

Experts have always posed a problem for democracies. Plato scorned democracy, rating it the worst form of government short of tyranny, largely because it gave power to the ignorant many rather than to knowledgeable experts (philosophers, as he saw it). But, if, as we insist, the people must ultimately decide, the question remains: How can we, nonexperts, take account of expert opinion when it is relevant to decisions about public policy?

﻿ ﻿ ﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿Sound Transit, who services the Puget Sound region, is in the process of identifying route and schedule changes for 2012 based on forecasted riders of 25.1 Million people for the year, a slight increase over the current year. ﻿﻿The expectation is that they will cut routes like cuts to most everything else in this state due to budgets, with a projected shortfall of about 25%, according to the Implementation Plan. ﻿﻿ After reading through the budget there is discussion about the savings made by the route cuts, but I wonder if during the meetings they discuss how to actually generate revenue that they are missing on now. ﻿﻿ I've been riding the public bus for over a month now and a few things I have noticed. The first is that most every bus I'm on is full to capacity and then some with standing room only. The bus on the route I take is a bus with two cars. So if they are projecting over 25 million riders next year, up from the current year where many routes are filled t…

Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a "fair and balanced" counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the "prejudices of network news" and deliver "pro-administration" stories to heartland television viewers